Design can speak the tongue of art with the force of commerce.
Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun.
The best is often when nothing is happening.
[…] Our lives happen between
the memorable.
I don’t understand the need for trickery or some new way of arranging words on a page. You’re allowed to do that. You’re allowed to write all kinds of poetry, but there’s a whole world out there.
Unfortunately, we found the Greece we knew was no longer there. Our Greece was wonderfully bucolic. Very quiet, peaceful, slow, friendly—farmers plowing, a couple of men in small boats, almost no electronics. A civilization that lasted four hundred years is gone now. Gone the way Paris is gone, the way Italy is gone. All gone. Everything that I dreamed of is gone. It was such a blessing to get over there when it still was. All of the things that I loved were on the brink of disappearing without my knowing it. You can’t go to Paris anymore; it’s not there. Greece and Japan aren’t there anymore. The places I’ve loved no longer exist.
To celebrate life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity.
Spending time among the replicators has helped me become aware of what it’s easy to acknowledge intellectually but more difficult to feel: that a piece of art is mortal; that it is the work of many hands, only some of which are coeval with the artist; that time is the medium of media; that one person’s damage is another’s patina; that the present’s notion of its past and future are changeable fictions; that a museum is at sea.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.
I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second
A wise woman one asked me: “What are you willing to give up in order to have the life that you really want?” I said, “Wow, I guess I have to say no to things I don’t want to do.” And she said, “No, you have to say no to things you do want to do — that party on Saturday night that you really want to go to, that television series that you’re obsessed with … you’re not doing that anymore.”
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.
Consider these words that you are reading - where did they come from? What about the language they are written in? What about the shape of the letters themselves? What about the font? If you are sitting in a chair, who designed that chair? Or the floor on which it sits? Think about the recipes of the food you eat or the music you listen to. The world we actually live in is made of ideas that have left human minds and entered the physical world. Indeed, the story of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural world into the mental one.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.
The hero in your life is never going to be the person who pats you on the head: it’s going to be the person who puts their own need to be liked aside to make you a better designer.
Hopefully, we are more than everybody can see.
You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naĂŻve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.